kategoriím

Kategoriím is a term used in information management to describe a user-generated, personal taxonomy: a flexible set of categories that an individual assigns to items such as notes, files, bookmarks, or media to organize knowledge according to personal needs. It represents a private structure that can evolve over time and is intended to support quick retrieval, contextualization, and overview of a user’s digital materials.

The word is a blend drawn from the Hungarian kategória (category) with a possessive ending to convey ownership, effectively meaning “my categories.” In practice, kategoriím is often employed in multilingual or language-agnostic contexts as a concept rather than a fixed, universal schema. It is typically implemented as a flat list or a hierarchical tree, allowing items to belong to multiple categories when appropriate. Users may combine kategoriím with traditional tags, folders, or metadata fields to enhance searchability and filtering.

Compared with formal taxonomies created by organizations, kategoriím emphasizes user autonomy and adaptability. Benefits include improved personal knowledge management, portability across apps, and reduced dependence on vendor-specific categorizations. Challenges include maintaining consistency as the collection grows, avoiding category drift, and ensuring interoperability when exporting or sharing data between systems.

In practice, a person might organize content with kategoriím such as work, personal, projects, travel, or language learning, and in Hungarian contexts, munka, személyes, projektek, utazás, nyelvtanulás. As a concept, kategoriím aligns with broader trends in personal knowledge management and metadata-driven organization, while remaining distinct from formal, externally imposed taxonomies.

See also: tagging, personal knowledge management, information taxonomy, metadata, data portability.